ILLUSTRATION: ÁLVARO BERNIS
IN 2025 stablecoins moved over $12trn. That figure, from on-chain data, puts the digital tokens within spitting distance of Visa’s annual settlement volume. Yet almost none of these transactions involved men in hoodies chasing ten-baggers. The money flowed from a freelancer in Lahore to a client in New York; from a factory owner in Ho Chi Minh City to a supplier in Shenzhen; from a migrant domestic worker in Singapore to her mother in Manila. Crypto is having its WhatsApp moment: after years of over-promising, it has discovered something it is actually good for.
Stablecoins are to bitcoin what email was to the telegraph. They strip out volatility by pegging themselves one-to-one with a real currency, usually the dollar, and run on blockchains that settle in seconds. The user does not see a token; she sees dollars arriving on a screen. Money has become software. And software, once written, tends towards free.
The price of cross-border payments has long defied gravity. The World Bank puts the average cost of sending $200 at 6.4%; Western Union and its peers have enjoyed oligopoly rents for decades. Fintechs such as Wise whittled those margins to around 0.5%, but they still rely on correspondent banking rails that can take days. Stablecoins settle in the time it takes to post a block. Stripe now accepts them at checkout, shaving merchant fees from 3% to 1.5%. SpaceX uses them to pull cash out of jurisdictions with wobbly banks. Fidelity has tokenised a money-market fund.
Yet the most vivid picture of what this shift portends lies in Asia. Chainalysis data show nine of the top twenty crypto-adopting countries in the region. India absorbed an estimated $338bn in inflows during 2024-25. Business-to-business stablecoin volumes, below $100m a month in early 2023, surpassed $6bn by mid-2025. In Pakistan and the Philippines the smartphone has become a teller window. Migrants who once queued at cash agents now scan QR codes. The correspondent bank is replaced by a blockchain; the fee, by a few satoshis of gas.
This is not merely cheaper. It is qualitatively different. A stablecoin transfer does not require permission, does not observe banking hours and does not stop at capital controls. That makes it a tool of quiet geopolitical consequence. Circle and Tether, the two biggest issuers, together hold roughly $140bn of short-term United States government debt to back their tokens. They are already among the world’s largest Treasury holders. Analysts at Citi Institute project that stablecoins could become the largest single constituency in the Treasury market by 2030. The dollar, challenged by dedollarisation rhetorically, is being exported virally. Every new stablecoin user adopts American monetary policy by default.
But this confidence hides an underlying fragility. The cost of moving money internationally is not primarily a function of slow technology. It is a function of regulation: anti-money-laundering checks, sanctions screening, currency conversion and the capital buffers required of licensed financial institutions. Wise already moves money at less than 0.5% using the old rails. It would happily use stablecoins, one of its executives notes, if the all-in cost—including compliance and fiat on-ramps—were actually lower. So far it is not.
PayPal, JPMorgan and Coinbase all face the same constraint. Once you wrap a stablecoin in the compliance necessary to satisfy the Financial Action Task Force, the speed advantage remains but the cost advantage shrinks.
The real revolution then may be less technological than competitive. The cross-border payments oligopoly was never invulnerable; it was just lazy. Wise and Revolut proved that. Stablecoins are now proving it again, from a different angle. Their threat to incumbents is not that they will replace Swift tomorrow. It is that they have made the cost floor visible. A blockchain transfer can cost pennies. That sets a ceiling on what any payment firm, crypto or fiat, can plausibly charge. Margins will be ground down by the brute fact of a cheaper alternative waiting in the wings.
Stablecoins will not eliminate compliance costs; democracies will not allow programmable money to operate as a regulatory blind trust. Nor will they displace the dollar’s institutional plumbing. But they are doing something more subversive: turning crypto from a speculative sideshow into a pricing benchmark. The gig worker in Manila does not care whether her wages settle on a blockchain or a ledger. She cares that yesterday’s 6% fee is today’s 0.3%. That is a revolution measured in basis points. ■
